Opinion
Editorial

Language cops reach extremes at Durham school board

Imagine a teacher asking a class to welcome a new student: “Class, this is Kim. She’s a 15-year-old girl who’s new to our class and our country. Kim and her mother and father are Korean immigrants. Please give her a warm welcome.”

Sounds like some pretty kind and intelligent words, right?

Wrong! If a teacher dares to say such things at a public school in the Durham Region, he or she will have violated the Durham District School Board’s new language guidelines.

The 19-page document, developed by a group of board officials, teachers and principals over a two-month period, are laughable. Yet, they are in use.

What the teacher in our above example should instead say, according to the 19-page collective brain fart, is: “Class, this is Kim. She’s a newcomer, a person from Korea. So too are her parents/guardians. Please give her a warm welcome.”

Terms to avoid, according do the Durham language police, include “husband or wife (spouse), ladies and gentlemen (men and women), anything referring to “man,” girlfriend or boyfriend (partner), calling men “boys” or women “girls,” and any direct referral to someone’s ethnic heritage.

So in the Durham board’s overly politically correct mind, a person isn’t British. But they are from Britain; you aren’t going to dinner with your husband, but rather your spouse; and you don’t want to kill your daughter’s boyfriend, but rather her partner.

This guideline also advises teachers to not tell racist jokes in class. Well, duh!

Someone might want to tell the language cops at work here they screwed up big time. Not only did they go overboard, but by using such terminology as “a person from Italy” rather than “Italian,” they have in effect made things worse by putting a spotlight on that person’s ethnicity.